Huge Increase in Sunshine Reaching Earth – 12.5 times the CO2 warming

The Hockey Schtick points to a new paper that finds a large increase in sunshine over the last 26 years.

“According to the authors, “the average increase of [surface solar radiation] from 1982 to 2008 is estimated to be 0.87 W m−2 per decade,” which equates to 2.26 W m-2 over the 26 year period. By way of comparison, this forcing was 12.5 times greater than the surface forcing alleged by the IPCC from increased CO2 over the same period.

“since the late 1980’s Rs has brightened over Europe due to decreases in aerosols but dimmed over China due to their increases. We found that variation of cloud cover determines Rs at a monthly scale but that aerosols determine the variability of Rs at a decadal time scale, in particular, over Europe and China.”

The warming since 1980 was caused by clean air legislation in the the US, UK and Europe.